Heath Lambert: This week on the podcast, I’ve invited Sean Perron back again to follow up on some more of your questions, particularly as they pertain to personal questions about my own counseling experience. Some of you have reached out as we’ve been answering your questions about counseling and wanted to know some personal stories about how counseling succeeded or how counseling failed, we talked about that some on the podcast last week, and, Sean, you’re back to help us talk about it again this week.
Sean Perron: So, we mentioned at the very end of the podcast last time your book that you edited with Dr. Stuart Scott, Counseling the Hard Cases: True Stories Illustrating the Sufficiency of God’s Resources in Scripture [1]. And in that book, which I think is a very helpful book, I found it interesting that all of the stories end well. So, all of the counseling cases the counselees receive help, and they’re changed and it’s a beautiful story of God’s grace through the Scripture. Are there any stories that that’s not the case, where the counseling ended poorly, or they did not change? I’d love to hear some personal stories about that.
Heath Lambert: No, it’s a great question. There’s a story attached to that, because when Stuart and I were working on the book, one of the things that we talked about is should we have some stories of counseling failure in the book? We actually talked about this long and hard because we actually didn’t want to communicate that when you do biblical counseling, the sun sets, the guy gets the girl, the credits roll, everybody’s happy, and everything is just wonderful. We didn’t want to communicate that and so we talked about should we have a story or two where there was counseling failure? We decided not to do it because the whole point of the book was to show that when you use the resources in Scripture, you have the goods to really, really help people change. The argument is that the resources in Scripture are not only just as good but superior to what the world has to offer, and so, our communicative intent was to show that. But that doesn’t mean that all counseling ends well, as a matter of fact, counseling does at times fail in one sense. In the specific sense that we want a happy ending, we want a happy conclusion, and that did not happen.
The reason I say that counseling fails in one sense is because we have to trust that the Lord is always doing what He deems is wise and best. He’s always working His plan. I think that just keeps us from being discouraged when counseling isn’t going the way we want it to go because that doesn’t mean God is failing to accomplish His purposes in the lives of these people that we’re helping. I mean for that to be encouraging that we can watch a counseling situation, we can watch a married couple, or an individual blow up in our face over the course of counseling, and still be encouraged that God is working His plan in their life. Even when we fail, we can trust that He is doing something good in that. In my own situation, I’ve got a lot of stories of counseling that has not ended well or else ended the way that I wanted it to.
One story that I can think of, and I remember this married couple with great frequency, it was a married couple that I met years and years ago. I came to know them, and he had been a serial adulterer over, and over, and over, and over again, dozens of women, and she found out about it through a terribly unfortunate series of events. She went from thinking her marriage was great with these kids to realizing that her husband had had countless sexual partners, and she realized it over the course of about a week. She wanted to work on the marriage, he wanted to work on the marriage, and they met with me for counseling. We met for months together, and we weren’t getting anywhere. Actually, she was changing. She was learning to grow and change and trust in the Lord in the midst of a really painful situation, but he wasn’t. In one sense, there were some good things. He had stopped committing adultery, at least for a season, and so, that’s a cause for rejoicing, but in another sense, he was just persisting in arrogance, he was mistreating his wife in terms of his anger and his general disposition, and we just kept working. We kept trying to deal with it.
At one point we had hit a wall. We weren’t getting anywhere. She was sitting in my office crying one afternoon wondering what else she could do to be a better wife, and I’m just telling you, there wasn’t anything else for her to do. Not that she was perfect and had arrived and didn’t need to grow in the grace of Jesus anymore, but their marriage was at a point where there was nothing that she could do that improvement in her area would have helped him. He was at a point where he had to decide what kind of man he was going to be. I looked at him and I just said, “I just want you to know that you are the most arrogant man I think I have ever met, and I don’t know how you could look at this woman on whom you have afflicted so much pain and continue to blame her for your difficulties, and not see any area of your own life where you would need to change, but all you see is false in her when she is the one who has tried to love and serve you, and you have betrayed her in the most heinous possible way. I just want to urge you to stop what you’re doing and turn to Jesus from this kind of arrogant hostility towards your wife.” That got everybody’s attention in the room and she kind of stopped crying and looked at me over a Kleenex and looked at him and he looked at me and he said, “You don’t have any right to speak to me that way. I’m not going to sit here and listen to this, and you can go do something with yourself [that I won’t repeat on this podcast]”.
Sean Perron: Pray?
Heath Lambert: That’s not his intent in the expression that he used. He got up and walked out and to this day I have never seen that man again. I stayed there and tried to comfort her and get her in a place with, “Hey, what’s it going to look like to go home and be involved in your home after a conversation like this?” We spent some time talking about that. I’ll mention two names here, I don’t think these guys will mind if I say their names. Over the years, there have been two people that when I’ve been in a difficult counseling situation the two people that I’ve reached out to for help have often been Stuart Scott and David Powlison, and I called both of them, and I said, “Look, here’s what happened, here’s what I did. Did I blow it? Was I too hard? Was I too aggressive?” Both of those guys who had known about the situation and I’d been pinging in with them for advice over the months together, they both said, “You know what, you were at a point where you had to confront this man with his arrogance, and you did the right thing.” But me doing what I sensed was the right thing, what his wife sensed was the right thing, and what two biblical counselors who are much more experienced than I am thought was the right thing led to a blow-up and I have never seen him again, never spoken to him again. As recently as a couple of years ago, I heard that the word on the street from him is that I’m the worst counselor in the whole world and anybody who knows what’s good for him will stay away from me.
I don’t see how you’d call that counseling success in the way that you’re asking the question. And yet, I think there is room for encouragement in the way I talked about, that God is working His purposes in that man. That man heard the truth. As a matter of fact, he was being arrogant. As a matter of fact, he was mistreating his wife. As a matter of fact, he did need to open his eyes to see things that he was refusing to look at. Somebody had to tell him that for his sake, for his wife’s sake, and for Christ’s sake, for his kids’ sake somebody needed to tell him those things and when he heard the truth, he didn’t like it, and he ran out of the room.
This is where, in fact I mentioned this last week, in Isaiah 55 the prophet says the Word of God does not go out and return void. Here’s what that means. That means that that truthful word that I spoke to him is still working on his heart. It is still refining him. I don’t know if that is working in such a way to harden his heart, or to soften his heart, but the Word of God is working in his heart and the encouragement I take from the counseling failure is that I had men around me who knew what was going on, who were advising me about how I could help, and I continue to believe that I said to him the word that he needed to hear. It wasn’t a warm, fuzzy word. It was more a word like Jesus gave to the Pharisees, “Woe to you.”, but it was a word that he needed, and I still pray for them when I think about them.
Their marriage ultimately ended, their family got pulled apart, and it’s in those moments where we have to take confidence as Christians that we are ministers of the Word, and we minister the Word, and we trust the Lord to do with His Word what He will do, and we’re not in control of that. One of the texts that I think of in this is Galatians 6:9, “Let us not grow weary in doing good for in due season we will reap if we do not give up.” I don’t think that verse is a guarantee that if we’re just faithful with the Scriptures every person we counsel will ultimately get better, but it is a statement about the global nature of our ministry to bear fruit as we are faithful to Christ and His Word. When I’m feeling discouraged about counseling failure, I think about texts like Isaiah 55 and Galatians 6:9 and others.